The state of sustainability reporting in European universities

Although there have been calls for universities to report their Sustainability performance, currently a limited number of universities provide Sustainability reports, and an even lesser number base their reports on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Guidelines. This article assesses the sustainability reports from six European universities that follow the GRI guidelines. The comparison was made using the Graphical Assessment of Sustainability in Universities (GASU) tool, which allows a relatively easy comparison of Sustainability performance of reports. The results show that sustainability reporting in universities is still in its early stages (both in numbers of institutions reporting and in level of reporting) when compared to sustainability reporting in corporations. Universities could learn from the experiences of corporate sustainability reporting efforts, and incorporate them into their efforts as learning organisations to better align their systems with sustainability